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Failure Anomalies alert now detects dependency failures

We’ve upgraded Smart Detection – Failure Anomalies so that it monitors your web app’s outgoing dependencies and AJAX calls as well as incoming server requests. If you’re monitoring your app with Application Insights, you’ll be notified within minutes if there’s a sudden disruption or degradation in your app’s performance.

Provided your app has a certain volume of traffic, Smart Detection – Failure Anomalies configures itself. It learns your app’s usual background level of failures. It triggers an alert if the rate of failures goes above the learned pattern. The diagnostic information in the alert can help you fix the problem before most users are aware of it.

Until recently, Smart Detection monitored only failed incoming requests. (Although you can manually set alerts on a wide variety of metrics.) Now, it also monitors the failure rate of dependency calls – that is, calls that your app makes to external services such as REST APIs or SQL databases. This includes both server-side calls, and AJAX calls from the client side of your app.

Here’s a sample of an alert you might get:

This upgrade improves the chances of your finding a fault quickly, especially if it’s caused by one of the services you depend on. You’ll get the alert even if your app returns a non-failure response to your users.

By default, you get a shorter alert mail than this example, but you can switch to this detailed format by selecting “Get more diagnostics…” in Failure Anomalies rule settings: